R.Scott Bakker - Disciple of the dog

“I suppose,” he said, his manner as brisk as his pace, “that you want to ask all the usual questions. Who sleeps with who. Who despi-”

“To be honest, this whole cult thing is kind of a curveball. I like to start from the outside and work my way in. I think I need to understand you first.”

He turned to me with an appreciative look. “Perhaps we should begin with a tour-you think?”

“Sure,” I replied.

Obviously the guy had a script he wanted to follow.

So we toured the Compound, my eyes darting this way and that as he described the history of the Framers from their beginnings in southern California to the purchase and renovation of the buildings around me. The place was a veritable maze, possessing, in addition to the seminar rooms and the dormitories, a small gym, a library, a games room that he called the “activity centre,” and even an indoor garden. Despite the thoroughness of the renovations, a kind of spiritual lurch and jar haunted the structure, inexplicable steps, zigzag halls, the ceilings claustrophobic one moment, agoraphobic the next-what you typically find when an architect imposes drastic new uses across ancient floor plans, only writ large.

Bad as the human brain.

“At first we considered buying one of the abandoned factories you passed on your way out here,” Baars explained, “but we ran into considerable… resistance, you might say, from city council.”

“Hard to zone silly,” I replied.

He smiled as if I were the kind of asshole he could appreciate.

We had come to a corridor with doors set at hotel intervals. Without warning or explanation, Baars pressed one open, gestured for me to join him. Several seconds passed before I realized I was looking into Jennifer’s room.

“The police have already been through-as you can see.”

Tossed or ransacked would have better described it. Either that or Jennifer Bonjour was a pathological slob.

The room was larger than I expected, with a double bed and night table crowded in one corner, and a small sectional arranged opposite an entertainment centre in the other. Despite the mess-strewn books and magazines, cushions piled like rubble, blankets balled like cabbage- it all seemed so suburban in a consumer credit kind of way. I guess I was expecting something more monastic. Say what you will about the Framers, self-denial was certainly not part of their creed.

I had rooted through the rooms of several missing persons by this time, so I was accustomed to the sense of spookiness. But her room troubled me more than usual for some reason. It was almost as if Jennifer’s sheer normalcy-down to the bloody Twilight books and DVDs-made her disappearance all the more tragic.

But in investigative terms, this was little more than a sneak preview- for me, anyway. In the movies, the dick always roots around and finds a decisive clue. Either a bona fide lead, like a pack of matches with a water- damaged phone number. Or a cipher, something that initially makes no sense whatsoever, like a gob of chewing gum in a condom, say, but eventually unlocks the entire case. But these are just narrative conceits. In reality, everything can mean anything-abject ambiguity is the rule, and if you go in blind, you will sure as shit read things wrong.

Jennifer’s room was what you would call a primary text, and I was just getting started on the secondary sources. Going in now would be like deciphering hieroglyphics using a tourist phrase book.

I needed to learn the grammar of the situation.

At least that was what I told myself at the time.

I turned from the entrance into his quizzical gaze. “Is there someplace we can talk?”

Baars smiled and nodded as if I had slipped the noose of one pet theory only to confirm a second. He led me back into the maze, yapping the whole way.

His tale was a familiar one: boy meets New Age revelation; boy builds end-of-the-world bunker. I could tell he had told it many times before, and that he never tired of repeating it. And why not, when it made him the Moses of the Modern Age? Conviction, whether religious or otherwise, requires a certain hunger for repetition. And flattery makes everything taste sweeter.

“It’s taken a lot of commitment,” he said, “and even more hard work, but the Framers are here to stay…”

“Until the world blows up.”

A patient smile. “Do you really think we’re that simple, Mr. Manning?”

“Define ‘simple.’”

Baars laughed like a teacher finding evidence of his genius reflected in a pupil. “‘Simple,’” he said, “is to follow the path of least social resistance, to go with the flow and believe what most everyone believes. In that sense, Mr. Manning, we Framers believe against the law of social gravitation.”

After so many smartass girlfriends, I knew this game. “But what if gravity is simply belief in general instead of this or that dogma? What if real courage consists in resisting belief altogether?”

Baars simply laughed harder. “Spoken like a true ironist!” He turned and fixed me with a look I found far too canny. “I imagine cynicism is a hazard of your trade-yes? The crazy parade of crazy people, everyone bent on justifying this or that petty transgression. It would be difficult not to take a dim view of people and their beliefs.”

“Ironist…” I said. The fucker was trying to turn the verbal tables. “Huh?”

“You think you wander a world filled with self-righteous morons, don’t you? Conceit. Vanity. Envy. Greed. You’ve seen it all, so now that’s all you see. But don’t you worry, Mr. Manning? I mean, ‘moron’ is simply a version of ‘sinner,’ isn’t it? A word we use to make ourselves feel superior. What if cynicism and self-righteousness were one and the same thing?”

Condescending prick. This is generally what I think of people who say things that fly over my head.

“But I do wander a world filled with self-righteous morons.”

Exactly, the man’s smile replied.

Usually, I feel sorry for ultra-self-conscious people-people like Xen Baars. They just spend so much of their time pretending. They sit in coffee shops forcing the kinds of conversations they think people like them should have. They laugh from the top of their lungs. And in the seams of their patchwork timing, you can always glimpse panic, like drummers too sober to keep the beat. Living is work for these people. An endless tour of performances with no spectacular failures to redeem them.

But this guy had taken the pantomime to an entirely different level. Inventing worlds behind worlds to redeem the artificiality of his existence. What could be more spectacular than that?

Without explanation, Baars turned to press open a heavy oak door to our right. He ushered me from the sun-bright hall into a low, dim room that reeked of bedpans and astringent. I grinned as my eyes sorted shapes in the gloom: because I remember everything people say, I have a bad habit of cracking myself up while others are talking. Obnoxious, I know.

But what I saw slapped the grin off my face. A hospital bed, illuminated by a single reading light, set in a semicircle of gleaming devices and spectral readouts. And a woman, impossibly frail, swaddled by blankets, wired into so many tubes that it seemed she would hang suspended if the bed were kicked away. She was more than old, she was ancient, withered not only by time but by some deep, internal trauma. Her mouth hung half open, as if her lower jaw were slowly shrinking into her neck. Her eyes were little more than black perforations at the bottoms of her sockets.

Then the reek hit me. Indescribable, really, like death in diapers.

“Her name is Agatha,” Baars said from beside me. “She suffered a mid-cerebral arterial stroke some five weeks ago. Since she’s one of ours, we decided to let her die here, among us.”